Lange’s Lens in Oregon

The art of photojournalism is an undertaking that many dabble in but few master, and even fewer are remembered for. The old saying of a picture being worth a thousand words is true almost always, but perhaps never more unerringly so than when attached to the work of Dorothea Lange.

American photo laureate of the Great Depression, Lange is best known for documenting the exploitation of rural sharecroppers and migrant workers. Her interests were primarily in capturing the barefaced and harsh realities of people surviving in dire times. She was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography which she relinquished in order to pursue the photographing of Japanese Americans detained in internment camps on U.S. soil — and a champion of the modern artist citizen.

Daring to Look: The Photographs of Dorothea Lange in Oregon will be on display Tuesday, Jan. 10, at the UO’s Knight Law Center and will run through mid February. The exhibit, sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, courtesy of the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, will include more than 50 photographs taken by Lange. — Dante Zuñiga-West

About the Author

Dante Zúñiga-West is an Afro-Latino writer and outdoorsman known to some as “The Backwoods Blaxican.” He grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and now makes his home in Oregon. His fiction has been published in various literary journals. His novel Rumble Young Man Rumble is awaiting publication in 2014, on Black Coffee Press.